As part the Hello Stranger festival of Performance Design, I hosted a 3 day intensive workshop for artist-designers working in live performance at the Albany in Southeast London alongside artist E.M.Parry. 

These workshops were a place for designers working with sound, costume, set, lighting and video to discuss their artistic interests, voice their concerns, dream big and imagine new ways of working. Using concepts around the trans gaze, queer imagination and non-anthropocentric models of collaboration as starting points, we asked: what can design-led work in live performance look, sound and feel like? How can we embrace pluralities in our work and processes? What does symbiosis look and feel like in design?

These workshops form part of an ongoing research into how non-human symbiotic processes of collaboration and information exchange observed in the natural world can be mapped onto artistic collaborations to find new ways of making and existing together that function outside and away from neoliberal frameworks. The way we worked and themes we explored also contributed to the Hello Stranger x Trans Gaze installation in Deptford Lounge.

Workshop participants were: Ioana Pitic, Mallika Joy, Alicia Jane Turner, Niamh Gaffney, Rosie Whiting, Julie Rose Bower, Rachel Sampley, Dana Pinto, Alys Whitehead, Lucy Thornett, Kathy Sandys & Xavier Velastin

Photos by Bex Wade

“The experience of embodying communal leadership in how we operated as a group and the openness and safety this created was super inspiring. Anna structured the workshop so beautifully” - participant

“It felt a bit like a dreamspace - and I think this safety opened up an exploration of a more fundamental honest humanity in the work, much more than other devising spaces I have experienced. To explore difficult feelings through play, and by doing that reclaiming them in a different light.” - participant

“It has had a big impact on me outside of my creative practice in embracing my neurodivergence and queerness, this is something I was not expecting as an outcome from this happening. The words 'this is like therapy' were uttered more than once, I think the workshops definitely had a feeling of communal healing. I felt very safe and equal throughout, I struggle with new groups of people so this is a big deal for me.” - participant